Even if it was to be pure masquerade and not my life at all, still the time had come when I must make a start, must drag my heavy feet forward. —Yukio Mishima
(Interrogator)
(Translator)
Confess!
pleas—
condemn.
redeem.
Admit, with
Witch!
Judge.
The true judge knows truth already.
a relative measure
and easily
misjudged—what veil
visage
covers
reveals.
It was best to be naked.
with a death mask only.
If you talk about death, you save part of yourself.
There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with.
Salvation lies in confessing them.
But at the same time, something of your real self dies:
the part of
me that was not yet sober
I know nothing more disgusting than death,
nothing more serious
and more sinister! How could some poets
find beautiful the ultimate
negation which cannot even wear the mask of the grotesque?
I am a twisted deformed freak that you don’t want to look at for long.
you admit death
grows inside
you—repentantly
the adverb explains a doubt fairly well
then submit another; you looked and carried yourself a certain way...
rigorously
interrogating
the self,
resolutely
confronting
those facts
that matter
what I was now disgusted with
was my true self
masca?
the specter, witch. I wanted to catch
a witch
so I could kill her.
a thick pure white blood.
I wasn’t sure what color it was, so many had been woven in.
I imagined that was what witch blood would look like.
my only recourse was to infer from theoretical rules what "a boy my age" would feel when he was all alone.
masque?
unseizability and variable visibility that explicitly or implicitly link these malefactors to ghosts.
maskharah?
buffoon!
or man in masquerade.
or person. or any person.
persona?
sounds through the actors' masks. many incarnations
of Rachel’s angst-filled monologue
whole wood of the masks' mouths funneling whispers
of no or ornament players
Although they spoke softly, and I wasn’t trying to listen
Of entering oneself.
no noise from my voice
By the time I got to the top I was screaming and chanting with them.
rite. observance.
bonfire. dancing silhouettes
he'd like to project
a ritual.
ritual
is no different
from this
fever
and submissions
[recorded and transcribed by Alex Davis]
Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New Directions, 1958.